That listing price is high for a 2bed/1.5bath, no matter where it is. I was disappointed by the photos, too. The ceilings seem low, so it makes the place feel smaller. The kitchen and baths would need re-doing and the 2nd bedroom is really small, considering it is being used as a nursery. Everything is so ordinary about this that I cannot understand why the asking price is so high.

Anonymous

Why do you say the asking price is high? We live just north of Pennsylvania and paid about $150k more for a house that is slightly larger with better finishes. We’d been looking in the area for two years so we had a good idea of what the comps were (our next-door neighbors who bought at the same time paid about the same for a similar house). I think $150k less for a smaller, not-as-special house over a year later is very reasonable.

classic_six

Due to the fact that one would be paying over $625/sq ft for a home that needed to be updated and is fairly unappealing due to feeling small. Remember, while the interior says 984 sq ft, there is a stairwell that eats into that sq ftage and is wasted space. Paying $625/sq ft is higher than many Dupont or Logan homes, even the homes listed for over a million dollars in these neighborhoods, which have typically been redone and updated already.

Anonymous

I don’t know, when we were house hunting we also had Dupont and Logan Circle on our radar, and the only house that we found that wasn’t a total wreck and in our price range was tiny like this one. As I recall it was listed at $729k and sold right away. It had been rennovated but otherwise it was pretty similar.

Fair point, but are you saying this part of the Hill is better or more preferable to Dupont or Logan?

H Street Landlord

Absolutely for a lot of people. No question. I love Logan and Dupont, but this area is just as nice, has beautiful homes, many want to walk to work which this enables, this has better transit access than Logan etc etc

Eastern Market

I agree that this location is very convenient for a lot of people. I love being able to walk to my job on M Street, for example. It’s convenient to VA and parts of MD too. Not everyone works downtown, and even if you do you’d still be on the same metro line.

Anonymous

It looks tiny but the location is really good. The all-white kitchen’s outdated, although I personally like it. Is it just me or is it awkward the way the front door swings directly into the foot of the stairs?

I wish there were more photos– I’d like to see what the bedrooms, bathrooms, and backyard (if there is one) look like. However, this seems like a decent price.

classic_six

It could be the angle of the photo and the lens used to take that photo to give it this perspective. I am imagining that there is a little more leeway than what the photo suggest. Though, if you are right, it would be awkward.

Yeah, that was my thought too — I think it’s just an awkwardly shot photo, but it does make the space look much more constricted than it appears to be in other photos. Not good, especially since it’s the second photo in the slideshow.

Seems cute but small, and lacking in bells and whistles that someone spending $619K might desire.

Anonymous

I’m not sure you could get something with bells and whistles in this neighborhood for less than $700k. You could somewhere else, of course, but assuming a buyer had a tight budget and wanted a rowhouse in Capitol Hill they could certainly do much worse.

skk

It is priced about right for the area. I live near Lincoln Park and payed around the same thing for my house which is about the same size.

br

Ditto. And, as much as I love Lincoln Park it’s worth more to be next to Barracks Row and the metro.

I think it’s a pretty good deal, frankly. It’s got windows on three sides, a nice front and side yard that is shady and would be cool in the summer, and is walking distance to everything (a block and a half to the Metro). The one downside, I think, is that the second bedroom is tiny and is probably more suited to be an office. Yeah, the kitchen needs to be updated, but this place is really sweet! I would take this before an overpriced, overdone condo any day.

br

Where are you seeing photos of the bedroom?

Anon3

I think it’s okay. It has a lot of the original character, which is nice but it does need work (like any older home). I agree with classic_six’s point re: sq footage. I think it’s priced only slightly higher than I expected.

Considering it is in probably the safest neighborhood in DC, within 5 minutes of two metro stops and a few blocks away from Eastern Market and Barracks row, I would take this in a heartbeat over that 800k condo posted here yesterday on Euclid. The kitchen, bathrooms are all surficial and can be magazine quality for 25K total.

Then you don’t have to live on Euclid and aren’t paying $300 a month in condo fees either.

Anonymous

I don’t believe the crime statistics corroborate your “safest” assumption. But it relatively safe for DC, and I agree with everything else you said.

According to CrimeReports, there’s only been 2 or 3 violent crimes in that neighborhood (west of 8th to Garfield Park) in the last 6 months – a couple robberies and one assault. That’s pretty darn safe considering the population density.

+10 joker. I can’t believe condos in Columbia Heights are going for 100K more than a semidetached house in Barracks Row. It’s just astounding.

anon

I know they have parking permit-only zones in that area, but even so, I wonder what off-street parking would be like. It seems impossible to find a place to park there, but maybe it’s different if you have the zone sticker.

Anonymous

It looks like a disaster to me. There’s an awesome parking lot under the freeway at the end of Barracks Row, but VAers and MDers try to poorly parallel park on the streets instead. They also totally fail to follow stop-sign intersection laws on the corner where this house is. There’s also a church around the corner, and I bet Sunday parking is impossible.

A previous poster mentioned that there’s not much crime, but I have to say, I’m surprised there aren’t more car accidents.

Eastern market

I live four blocks away from here. I can usually get parking on my block, except on the weekends during the day (when the outdoor market is going on).